I love supermoto racing. It is a low cost way for everyday riders to have fun on the asphalt without a lot of expense. For this shot I went to MacArthur Park Raceway in Oklahoma City for a local race. If you have ever been to the racetrack, you know the area around it is horrible for pictures – weeds everywhere, trash along the river, just not a very scenic place. I figured the sky always works for a backdrop! For this picture I used a large silk overhead to cut down the sunshine on my subject so that I could build the lighting back up with my strobes. A front strip softbox to camera left gave my model frontal lighting. A large softbox on the ground in front of the camera provided fill. I had volunteers hold the silk from blowing away (always a problem in Oklahoma) and I had a line of volunteers waiting to spray water on my model.
I originally had another model scheduled for this shoot, and although normally reliable, she didn’t show up for this shoot. So I walked around the pits and found this gal and asked her if she wanted to be in the shot. She jumped at the chance, but wanted to run home and change first. That was fine but when she came back, she had really heavy makeup on with really long eyelashes. That obviously wouldn’t work for a picture depicting her as a motorcycle racer, so I had her don sunglasses and turn her head away from the camera. We ended up using the shot on the cover of the magazine.
And the original.
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